Friday, 13 July 2012

Ok so religion is a bit loopy, we all know that. If it is not a god who's chariot is the insanely hot Sun; Zeus, or only being allowed to enter the paradise afterlife if your heart weighed the same as a feather; the Egyptian mythos, then it is insane traditions and rituals, and division over what you eat and how you eat it.
This talk is about Catholicism and some of its absurdities. I was raised in a Catholic household, and I bought all the explanations for the outlandish claims and my disarming childish questions hook, line and sinker. Obviously eventually I got better, but it took time, this talk will hopefully add some humour to those who lost large chunks of their life to the same delusion as I did, and to those who weren't raised Catholic they can have a chuckle and scratch their heads in disbelief too.

I should pause here for a sec, as I will say Catholic throughout this talk, I of course mean Roman Catholic. I know now that lots of other churches sign on to the Nicene creed and call themselves "One holy Catholic and apostolic church" and the term "Roman Catholic" is the way they are differentiated, but Catholics are very insular and think as all religions do that they have the monopoly on truth, so they are the only Catholics, the rest mere protestants. To talk like a real Catholic you also need to say protestant as though you have a bit of phlegm in your mouth to show your disdain, and also emphasise PROTEST in the word, to make them seem like they are just whinging children who didn't get their own way in how the church was run. Of course not getting their own way was the reason they split off not the sale of indulgences or anything like that. Now on to the body of the talk.

First here is some humour to set the mood of this talk;

Transubstantiation, quite a mouthful really but the doctrinal belief that all Catholics, if they wish to call themselves that have to adhere to. The belief that during the ceremony of the Catholic mass the wafer and the wine becomes the literal body and blood of Christ, without changing appearance. As Rodney Dangerfield once said after he tried the Blood of Christ at a Catholic church "wow this guy must have been loaded 24-7".
They take that it has become the literal body and blood of Christ due to the words Jesus supposedly said at the last supper; "Take this and eat, it is my body, it has been given up to you", and Paul's 1st letter the Corinthians, "The cup of blessing that we bless, is it not a participation in the blood of Christ? The bread that we break, is it not a participation in the body of Christ?"10:16.
But they have had to make some caveats to this belief. Introduction of the sin of Host desecration, and the investigation of Jews mainly for this as hey they might be trying to crucify and torture Christ again. Question is how small does the whip and crown of thorns have have to be to torture a small wafer, and how do you crucify a cracker, with matchsticks?References: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transubstantiationhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Host_desecration

This goes on to the next abhorrent and crazy fact about Catholicism. They tortured ohh so many during the inquisition, under the guise to discover heretics, witches, consorts with the devil and the aforementioned host desecrater's. The real reason of course for this was to gain money, power and land, and the good old fear of the unknown.
One of the interesting and disgusting stories, was of a poor Jewish born but converted woman who owned a fair amount of land, after several Saturday's of her neighbours noticing that she had no smoke coming from her chimney and thus no fire they dobbed her into the church. The church knew this woman had a lot of land and if she was a heretic it was theirs, they unleashed Tomas de Torquemada a Dominican Friar who began the inquisition as he was the Churches head inquisitor in Spain at the time. He used a technique he himself had devised, he called it the "water cure" we now know it by its other name water boarding. Torquemada used this technique on his most hated of heretics the Jew who had converted to Catholicism only publicly to save from being killed, he would tie these people to a ladder then tip them down so their head was below their body, plug up their nose and force open their mouth, placing a cloth over there mouth he would pour water onto their face. The church and Torquemada had strict rules, a physician had to be present to ensure the accused was of right mind during their confession and that the inquisitor didn't over torture causing death. Torquemada's rule was no more than 8 jugs of water to be used per session as not drown the accused.
So now you know, that the church has also among other things given us water boarding and Torquemada is responsible for writings that possibly inspired Hitler with its vigorous anti-Semitism.References: http://www.trutv.com/library/crime/notorious_murders/mass/torquemada/index.html

Little known fact, Catholic Priests are allowed to be married, and have been before. At present this is due to a loophole. The loophole goes like this; if you are a Priest in another Christian denomination, usually Church Of England aka Anglican here in Australia and Episcopalian in the USA, and you Marry someone, you decide to convert the, Catholic church will allow you to become a Catholic Priest and remain married, removing the bit about abstinence much to the either happiness or chagrin of your partner. I wonder if you found an Anglican church that allowed Gay marriage, took orders to be a Pastor, married to your same sex yet partner then converted if the loophole would still apply, this would be the long con but it would be almost worth it.References: http://www.ewtn.com/library/ANSWERS/MARPRIE.htm

On Catholic Priests previously allowing marriage, not until the First Council of the Lateran of 1123 did they make it canon law that a Priest or other person that had taken holy orders could not marry or have a concubine, funnily enough the same Council where they banned incestuous marriages... so it took them 1000 years to work out that incest was bad and seemingly lumped it in the same boat as a married priest.
Of course Pope Siricius who left his wife and children to become pope issued a decree in 385 that priests should stop living with their wives... A lot of popes even managed to have on record children that then became popes themselves.References: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Council_of_the_Lateranhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sexually_active_popes
The Catholic church also possibly allowed gay marriage, not to mention gay Popes in the list previous. The church only denounced Gays in 314 in the 16th Canon of the Council of Ancyra and prior to that and after they had Adelphopoiesis, the rite of brotherhood, similar to a marriage rite but between two men. This rite, now defunct has been argued by the late John Boswell to be a rite of marriage between a homosexual couple.References: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adelphopoiesis

The ineffable Christopher Hitchens talking homosexuality
and the church;

Onto Papal infallibility. This is supposedly passed down by the first head of the church, the disciple Peter. It is like a super power the Pope has, but of course with every power comes limitations. The Pope has to activate his super power, and can't use it when dealing with anything other than matters of faith and spirit, and it has to be when he is addressing the entire church. But it basically means he can't be wrong... but only in matters of the unproven and impossible to disprove spirit.
The pope has since tweeted, most of them fairly vacuous, some almost humourous though you would laugh at him not with him. What was more interesting was looking at the hashtag that started (#askpontifex) prior to his tweet, most of it was calling the Catholic church and the pope out on their failings, or making fun of the whole institution.References: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Papal_infallibilityhttps://twitter.com/Pontifex

Here is an interesting one, the Vatican is not that large in area, how many rooms do you think the Papal palace has? 100, 200, 1000? If you said any of them you are wrong, ok we don't know how many rooms exactly, but it has 12,000 windows, yep someone counted, over 1000 halls and possibly anywhere up to 11,000 rooms. Not a bad little place really.Did I mention that Pope Benedict has rooms filled with Gold treasure, interestingly to quote one of the previous popes; "this morning, I flushed my toilet with a solid gold lever edged with diamonds and at this very moment, bishops and cardinals are using a bathroom on the second floor of the papal palace which trappings, I am told, would draw more than fifty million dollars at auction . . . Believe me, one day, we who live in opulence, while so many are dying because they have nothing, will have to answer to Jesus as to why we have not carried out His instruction, ‘Love thy neighbour as thyself.’ We, the clergy of the Church together with our congregations, who substitute gold and pomp and ceremony in place of Christ’s instruction, who judge our masquerade of singing His praises to be more precious than human life, will have the most to explain.” -Pope John Paul the 1st.
But this is not how Ratzinger does it, he has gold cloth hats and robes, gold chairs and a newly refurbished million dollar pope mobile as well as the need for extra leg room;

Yep the Church has exorcists, lots of them. Technically speaking they are supposed to have one for every diocese, including the head exorcist for the Vatican. You kind of wonder if they have Fairy whisperers and dragon wranglers as well.
The theory goes that only Catholics get possessed, and when it isn't some mental illness it is a demon, this says about God's omnipotence leaves something to be desired. Some like the one from the Vatican said he would do a hundred exorcisms a year, and made extraordinary claims such as displays of super-human strength and telekinesis, yet he has no other evidence other than his appeal to authority.
These demons must hate science more than they hate priests cause one of these possessed people has never been studied to see how they achieve these results, and I can bet you the US military would literally kill to get their hands on superhuman strength and telekinesis.
This makes me think of that Richard Pryor quote:References: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/harry-potter/8915691/Harry-Potter-and-yoga-are-evil-says-Catholic-Church-exorcist.html

A little serious section here;

Number killed during the papacy; So in 1400 years, just through inquisitions and witch hunts alone and estimated 50 million people have been killed (about 48,000 per year)
Not to mention genocide of the South American indians, conservatively estimated at 15million, and between 7 and 12million during the thirty years’ war.
Here is something the catholic church can be proud of, during WWII, in Germany about 30% of the population was Catholic, almost 70% Lutheran. Have a guess how many objected to the Nazi's policies openly from the Catholics, 0 Clergy and 7 laity, 7. If this isn't and indictment on the Catholic church I don't know what is.
References: http://webwitness.org.au/estimates.htmlhttp://www.catholicarrogance.org/Catholic/RC_scandal-2.html#clergynazisupport

Pope is a liar and tries to re-write history;
The Vatican helped Jews during WW2; http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/8464453.stm
The Vatican turned all the church's birth registers over to the Nazis so they could filter people of Jewish origin out of the population.
The Vatican never once criticised events in the concentration camps, even when they became publicly known in 1942.After the war, the Vatican issued passports and travel tickets to high-ranking Nazis to aid their escape to South America, among other places. They received a letter of thanks and praise from Eichmann, who was so grateful that he converted to Catholicism.
Not one of the Nazis who had cast all of Europe into an extensive bloody war and annihilated millions of innocent people was ever excommunicated. Hitler was and remained to his death a Catholic in good standing.
The current Pope, Benedict, plans to sanctify the wartime Pope, Pius XII, who maintained such chummy relations to the Third Reich at the time.
Lots of illuminating supporting material here: http://markhumphrys.com/christianity.ww2.html

Our ex-Vatican exorcist is at it exposing happenings again, this time saying a very famous missing girl in Italy was the result of regular kidnappings by the Vatican police and subsequent sex parties. Once the Vatican police where done with the girl they disposed of her: http://www.rt.com/news/girl-vatican-sex-priest-975/

Child sex scandal has been going on for a long time in the church. This video explains its history better than I can.
A good overview of Catholic Child Sex abuse by the ABC's Hungry Beast;

Rupert Murdoch, while not a Catholic but married to one. He also does consider himself a not very intense Christian. Now this not very intense Anglican goes to church occasionally, most of the time with his wife to a Catholic church. So when LA's diocese education fund was a bit light, they got some cash of Rupert, then when their cathedral was being rebuilt, he dropped $10million to assist in the rebuild.
For all of this he got the order of St Gregory, basically a Knighthood, from the Pope, then there was talk of them stripping it from him, this after they haven't defrocked a single child molesting priest, excommunicated Hitler or almost any Nazi.
Ah well he probably gave the money over to the LA church as that would easily be what he would make in a year off of "Zondervan", a company he owns that makes bibles and which has the exclusive publishing rights with NIV (New international version), one of the 7 Catholic Bibles .As a little aside, how many inerrant works of the omnipotent creator do they need? They have 7 from my count, at the moment; Jerusalem Bible and the New Jerusalem Bible, the Revised Standard Version (RSV) and the New Revised Standard Version (NSRV), the New American Bible (NAB), the aforementioned NIV, The Good News Bible (there is a catholic edition). You think God could have got the message right the first time for everyone on the planet to understand.

So that was an example of a division within Catholicism but it is not, I found out the only one. Not to be outdone by those dirty protestants and their ~30,000 denominations, There are heaps of catholic divisions as well, if it is not holy orders like, Dominicans, Franciscans, Salesians (Father foxes order), or Jesuits it is one of almost 40 other orders, then it is all out throwbacks who think the common person shouldn't understand the word of the supposed creator and still say the mass in Latin, still with their back to the people.

So Lent is a pretty silly tradition. It all starts with an ashen cross on your forehead and ends with kissing the feet of some s&m statue. I remember how much I both enjoyed and hated the Pancakes we would have on Shrove aka Pancake Tuesday the day before Ash Wednesday as it was a sign of the end. No softdrink, no movies, no chocolate, no lollies, no cakes or sweets. Then easter would finally roll around after what seemed like an eternity of this and what would I get subpar chocolate or worse carob.
If it is not admonishing women for getting an abortion (40 days of life), it is reclassifying Beavers, as fish because hey they swim in water, and their tails kind of look like a fish fillet.
Speaking about fish fillet, Jesus really wanted to push some business the way of his friends so there is no meat on Fridays for Catholics, although most have relaxed this of late. But it is still the reason the fillet-o-fish from MacDonalds exists, and the reason they have tried other fish based meals to get that Catholic dollar. Cause sure you can't have sweets but you can have fatty fish on a 20% sugar bun. References: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenthttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filet-O-Fishhttp://blogs.dallasobserver.com/cityofate/2012/02/mcdonalds_releases_fish_mcbite.phphttp://forums.catholic.com/showthread.php?t=635154

Opus Dei are just nuts, not albino psycho monk nuts, but nuts all the same. I don't know if I have ever had any dealings with them in my previous life as a Catholic but I suspect some of my family of being at least associated, that's why I looked into it. I am now pretty sure they are actually members. The sect holds that its members must remain secretive and are not allowed to reveal they are a member of Opus Dei usually to anyone without permission from their superiors, and definitely not to the general public. If they are single and female they are to live in a commune controlled by the higher ups, their mail is opened and their lives fully controlled, and they are supposed to practise self-flagellation, whipping themselves. These single Opus Dei members are forced to labour for the other members and clergy, usually 10 hours a day seven days a week, and any money they are paid is donated to the community or church.
They even perform a cult technique called love bombing, where they shower a new initiate with praise and effect ion to win them over. Yet the Pope still thinks Opus Dei are a-ok, the previous Pope even acknowledged them and the work they do, the current has assigned them to tasks he wishes to complete.
Let's look at what an average day holds for them;First thing in the morning;
Heroic minute, waking up punctually and saying "Serviam!" (Latin for I will serve)
Morning offering, fixing one's intentions to do everything for the glory of GodThroughout the day;
Spiritual reading and reading the New Testament, a practise recommended by St. Paul and other saints
Mental prayer, conversation with God
Mass, Communion and Thanksgiving after Communion
Visit to the Blessed Sacrament, a Catholic practise of greeting Jesus in the Eucharist
Rosary
The Preces (the common prayer of Opus Dei)
Angelus prayer
Memorare prayer to the Blessed Virgin Mary offered for the Opus Dei member in most need at that exact moment
Short, spontaneous prayers throughout the day, offering up to God one's work, sufferings etc.End of the day;
Examination of conscience at the end of the day
Three Hail Marys before bed to pray for the virtue of purity

Here is an interesting little tidbit, the Vatican has an age of consent, it is 14 years of age. Something that most of us in the west would be a little disgusted with. But it isn't there fault they just copied the laws of the rest of Italy. So really not that crazy, though surely most residents of Vatican city have taken a vow of celibacy, except the Vatican police we talked about earlier and the Vatican guard, but really there is no age of consent for gays and all those police and guards are men... so really the age of consent must be for the one hotel in Vatican city, but surely the church would prefer that this sex was only done on the chance of conceiving so maybe just remove the age of consent and outlaw it in your crazy little city.References: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ages_of_consent_in_Europe#Vatican_State
Dan Savage on sex in the Vatican

So onto Pope Joan http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pope_Joan, who it is debatable whether she existed or not. Yes I did say she... The story goes that sometime during the middle ages, around the 9th century there may have been a female pope. She was a smart and powerful woman who disguised herself as a man and due to her intellect quickly rose through the ranks of the priesthood, to become Pope. The story continues that she was found out after falling pregnant, though no one noticed she was pregnant, I guess papal robes can hide a lot, they did finally notice during her papal procession while riding through a town she started labour and gave birth. The story is unclear here, she either died from complications or the crowd killed her. The story continues that due the embarrassment this caused the church buried the story. This story maybe a complete fabrication, but with history it can be difficult to tell the truth.Now supposedly due to Pope Joan or at least the possibility of her, the Sedes Stercoraria came into existence. A chair designed to allow the Bishops of Rome to ensure that the pope was both Male and an undamaged Male at that. The bible also says that a male with damaged genitals may not enter into the house of the lord, (Deuteronomy 23:1). So on to this chair, it has a hole in it, and it was either held aloft as the cardinals in Rome where to check out the pope so to speak, the other reported method was that the chair had a hole in both the seat and the front so that the Cardinals could check by feel. There is some reports, though none verified or admitted by the Holy See that this goes on, to this day.http://popes-and-papacy.com/wordpress/?p=249

Prophesy, something almost all religions claim. The church is basically and end of the world cult gone crazy. With Jesus in the bible claiming the end would come before some of the apostles present would taste death (Matthew16:28), then Paul seemed to say the end was very nigh, saying not even to bother marrying (1 Corinthians 7:29). Then the papacy continued this tradition. Pope Sylvester the 2nd was convinced (as were others) that the end would come in the year 1000; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennialism
Then Pope Innocent the 3rd predicted that the world would end 666 years after the rise of Islam in 1284, though this may have been to get support for his crusade he was waging, regardless it did end for him though a lot earlier as he died in 1216.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_dates_predicted_for_apocalyptic_events

I have been attacking the Pope and head of the church a bit, and I guess rightly so. If he acts crazy and adheres to crazy doctrines, then the whole institution is corrupt and should be shunned.
Finally an incredibly hilarious rap song by a young comedian about the Roman Catholic church;

Sorry this post was a long one, I hope it was funny and informative. I will post the video of my talk on the Sydney Atheists youtube page as soon as I can.
If I missed any references above, or I am wrong on any of this I don't mind being corrected, as long as you have references and evidence to back it up. Obviously some of this is my opinion and but it is based on the research I have done thus far and the life I have lived, happy to change my mind if presented with new evidence.

Slide deck (though I have added it into the post now) used during this talk is here.